Posted
by
samzenpus
on Monday August 25, 2014 @04:51PM
from the shut-it-down dept.

An anonymous reader writes Michael Peck, who for five years was Diablo Canyon's lead on-site inspector, says in a 42-page, confidential report that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is not applying the safety rules it set out for the plant's operation. The document, which was obtained and verified by The Associated Press, does not say the plant itself is unsafe. Instead, according to Peck's analysis, no one knows whether the facility's key equipment can withstand strong shaking from those faults — the potential for which was realized decades after the facility was built. Continuing to run the reactors, Peck writes, "challenges the presumption of nuclear safety."

US starts buying more nuclear power from Canada, quickly pulling a Germany. In 5 years, subsidies much like those in Germany will then be gutted, and there will be a mass rush to build new coal and NG power plants until reactors can be refurbished or built anew.

The article indicates consumers should see reduced rates as a result of the new power. Exporting natural gas will raise domestic electricity costs substantially. The competent thing to do is to treat natural gas as strategic. Build the export facilities but only use them when Russia tries blackmail.

US starts buying more nuclear power from Canada, quickly pulling a Germany. In 5 years, subsidies much like those in Germany will then be gutted, and there will be a mass rush to build new coal and NG power plants until reactors can be refurbished or built anew.

Almost: Germany has been in a mad rush for quite a while to build solar and wind power production. The whole country is dotted with thousands of wind turbines, and a massive percentage of the country have solar panels to reduce their power demands from the grid. In short, Germany has been preparing for a while to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels, and was consequently in a position to abandon nuclear power instead. At their current build rate, in 10 years, they will only need 50% of the fossil fuels they use today, even with the nuclear plants shut down

The key to their success is that, for Germans, the overriding goal is environmental protection. Its a national obsession (Probably owing to complete lack of available land, and limited fossil fuels). Like Japan, one bad nuclear accident is guaranteed to affect a massive percentage of the population, fossil fuels leaves them too reliant on foreign powers. It means that Germany's only real option is renewable energy sources, and they have the political will and industrial might to make it happen.

Unlike American politics, the anti-environment sociopaths don't last long in German politics.

Germany has been in a mad rush for quite a while to build solar and wind power production.

Germany has also been in a mad rush to build more coal fired power plants, and Germany is buring more brown coal [spiegel.de] than ever before. Germany's environmental policies have been a disaster. They have sky high electricity rates, are heavily dependent on Russian gas, and are spewing more CO2 than ever before. The only thing they have accomplished is to set an example of what not to do.

Germany is switching its baseload from nuclear to coal, which has meant digging the world's largest strip mine:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... [wikipedia.org]covering 48 square kilometers. Think of it as an anti-nuclear exclusion zone, like Fukushima but getting bigger instead of being cleaned up..

But when all the nukes are phased out, Garzweiler won't be enough. This even bigger lignite pit:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H... [wikipedia.org]will top out at 85 sq. km when fully developed. Lignite has the approximate energy value, and pollution profile, of damp firewood.

Most of the closures and new builds were announced before Fukushima, and some of the new builds have been either cancelled or mothballed since. The ones that are opening are unlikely to ever make much money, if any.

The difference between a strip mine and Fukushima is that the mine is planned and will be cleaned up and returned to a re-usable state when finished with, and didn't destroy multiple towns and villages or kill

Think of [Hambach Tagebau] as an anti-nuclear exclusion zone, like Fukushima but getting bigger instead of being cleaned up..

Quite ridiculous proposition: you cannot get cancer by entering the mine, nor is it incompatible with human life, and once depleted the mine reverts to normal soil on which you can grow crops. See the map of open-pit mines near Cologne [wikipedia.org] that you mentioned, and compare the satellite images of the same area [google.no]. Notice how the areas of previous development (Frechen, Zukunft-West, Bergheim) h

That is an informative link, but nothing in it dispels the claim that they are digging a giant strip mine. If anything, it corroborates the statement by pointing out that they are building more coal plants. All it does is explain *why* they are building the plants, and that they have been planning to do so for a long time.

No one will probably follow that link anyone since you added insults into your post, guaranteeing it never goes above 0.

Energy costs make up a small part of a family's budget compared to health care, education, etc etc.

No, people would not "lose their minds" if electricity prices tripled. You just might not have as many houses decorated with extravagant Christmas displays for two months every year. There's so much energy wasted in the US it's not funny. Living in the same home, working at the same place and using the same gizmos, my family's been able to cu

Once they're installed, solar panels don't send you a bill every month.

The problem with solar is that it requires an upfront investment that pays back over a long term but does not significantly increase the value of your home. This means its only worth installing the panels if you can guarantee staying in your current property for a considerable length of time. Sure, some people can make that commitment (notably the older generation) but a lot of people can't.

i.e. if I spend £20K on PV panels and then sell the house, no one is going to pay £20K more for it just

Thats the difference between the US and Germany. People in Germany have *chosen* to pay more for electricity and gas. They did so because they know that their money is buying better living conditions for everyone. Thats is why they have such high taxes. Funny but the typical standard of living in Germany is much better than the US in spite of the high taxes. In the US, its the exact opposite. Everyone wants theirs and Fuck everyone else. In the end everyone in the US suffers except the dwindling few who can

Solar doesn't provide energy in the evening or nighttime, wind is unpredictable and hydro involves environmentally damaging waterway modifications. The end result is that fossil fuels and nuclear will always have a place on the grid.

The worst thing we could possibly do is to start installing solar cells on each individual house, while trying to maintain our current consumption. The challenge is that there is a profitable multi-billion dollar market selling grid-tied personal solar and wind power systems to

Solar cells on every house is great as long as there is local storage in every house too.

Wind power is great as long as there is good power distribution infrastructure: It's always blowing somewhere.

Nuclear power is great as long as you address operational safety and waste storage, both of which are addressable if you do engineering rather than politics. Part of that is again, good infrastructure so you can build the nukes in good places for nukes.

It's easy to point at any single generation or harvesting technology and identify it's flaws as a sole solution. However there are many technologies and combined together they form a robust and comparatively clean solutions.

However there are many technologies and combined together they form a robust and comparatively clean solutions.

And that is the answer. Too bad it eludes so many in search of their own vision of the holy grail of green. Unfortunately, politics and ideology will get in the way, rather than a common sense evaluation of cost, risk, reliability, environmental impact, technological maturity, and ability to implement given our current state.

> And that is the answer. Too bad it eludes so many in search of their own vision of the holy grail of green

Oh don't go blame this on the "greens". The only green involved is money. *Everyone* selling a particular solution claims it is the only solution needed for everything. You hear this *far more often* from nuclear supporters than PV people.

Example. In this article, the engineer proposes that we should supply most of Ontario's power from a fleet of refit CANDU reactors. CANDUs don't throttle, so what

While that particular proposed solution may make no sense, it doesn't mean there isn't one, and the need for that solution is partially the result of poor overall planning. Yes, nukes can load follow quite easily if designed that way, but that was not a design need when this generation of plants was built. The fact that other sources are being put on line that needlessly offset or are not compatible with the characteristics of existing generation is more the result of a political push to renewables than an

You don't need local storage for solar. Solar peaks during peak energy usage and an upgrade to the power grid can send it where needed or even store the electricity for later.

The problem is, infrastructure is a big investment and it is not sexy. Congress will keep on kicking the can down the road because they lack vision and foresight and Americans want action today rather than investment in the future.

Nuclear power is great as long as you address operational safety and waste storage, both of which are addressable if you do engineering rather than politics.

Safety is not a purely engineering problem though, much of it is politics and business. If you want to design a safe nuclear plant you have to figure out how to deal with those as well as the engineering challenges.

How do you ensure your design is free from defects and flaws? How do you make sure your design is followed exactly and no cost-cutting changes are made? How do you ensure that over the plants operational life-time, which is likely out outlast your working and possibly your actual lifetime, no cor

"Following the AP report, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee announced it would hold hearings into how the NRC has handled Peck’s recommendation. Sen. Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat who chairs the panel, said in a statement she’s alarmed his report has lingered at the agency for a year. “The NRC’s failure to act constitutes an abdication of its responsibility to protect public health and safety,” she said." http://www.theepochtimes.com/n... [theepochtimes.com] Here is one way

Actually, solar and wind provide a consistent output that is very predictable. The key is upgrading the grid to handle it properly.

Photovoltaics built on existing and new structures is something that most experts in the field strongly recommend, because it decentralizes power generation and can potentially provide enough power alone to exceed current consumption.

Energy efficiency is important, but we're not going to get rid of fossil fuels that way. Right now, the only thing that can replace them are nucl

We can also develop energy uses that can tolerate fluctuations in supply. Have your offshore windfield deliver desalinated water instead of varying amounts of power, and you have near-free local water (after construction costs) for coastal cities, every liter of which is a liter that doesn't have to be delivered from a thousand miles inland.

The best place for solar PV is on our vast acreage of low-rise rooftops in sunny parts of the country. A 2000-sqft home occupied only by a retired couple in the right place can cancel out all its daytime power consumption by using solar. If you have a few children, PV can still mitigate your grid draw.

But now look at a city highrise apartment or office. Its roof area, tiny in comparison to all the people and businesses inside it, cannot hope to generate enough power to service its inhabitants. Then there's

And nuclear doesn't (generally) peak. Either way you need some other generation capacity to make up for the peaks and valleys. Which is precisely why Ontario had the west's largest coal plant, and now has significant gas peakers, in spite of getting half our power from nukes.

In fact we now have so much load following capability that we can deploy a WHOLE LOT of renewables, essentially for zero upstream cost. Which is precisely what we're doing.

Renewables are not yet ready or cost effective and there isn't enough that can be cost effectively developed. Solar panels have just recently become self sustaining (where they create more energy than is needed to make them). Solar also only works well in areas with lots of sunshine and when there are no clouds which is a small part of the USA. Industrial scale solar plants out in desert areas have their own issues, they use lots of water, some kill lots of birds and make significant cha

Not true. The taxes on gasoline and other fossil fuels far exceed the tax breaks for oil exploration.

Not if you start to examine the externalities of the fossil fuel industry.

Like the wars in the Middle East and the environmental cleanups. The money BP put into the Gulf repair wasn't but a small fraction of the costs. The rest have to be picked up by government. You and me.

The "coal subsidies" only affect the profit of a few politically connected democrats

Man, you're behind the times. I'm not talking about those subsidies. I'm talking about the externalities, like the health care costs for the people who get sick from coal, or the environmental costs of coal or the way coal destroys communities.

Solar panels have just recently become self sustaining (where they create more energy than is needed to make them).

Ignoring the other issues with your post that statement is just plain silly. You're saying that over the (at least) 20-30 year life span of a solar PV panel it just barely produces more power than it took to build it. I'd like to see you try and justify that statement with actual facts.

Solar is getting cheaper every year and reached grid parity for most of the worlds population 2 years ago. In UK and Germany we are installing residential Solar PV for a small fraction of the US installation costs and even in ra

This is not a new story, basically a reprint. With that said, if there is any indication the the plant cannot withstand postulated earthquake levels it should be shut down. This was not ignored, and the article does mention that an evaluation was performed based on the new information.

"In 2012, the agency endorsed preliminary findings that found shaking from the Shoreline fault would not pose any additional risk for the reactors. Those greater ground motions were “at or below those for which the plant was evaluated previously,” referring to the Hosgri fault, it concluded."

Given our experience with plants holding up extremely well to seismic events and the large margins that are included in seismic design of these plants, the finding is not surprising. Work continues, as it should, to look for anything that could possibly have been missed or not enveloped by the new data.

The basis for the inspectors complaint is, in large part, not that the plant is not capable of withstanding the quake, nor that the analsyis is faulty or incorrect, but rather that the licensing basis document has not been revised to require a higher peak acceleration design level. It is debateable whether such a would make any difference, since they are already required to analyze for the higher levels. Meanwhile, the concern is being handled through the appropriate processes.

There's that newfangled p-wave detector, only costs $80m to build and $12m / year to operate - if the reactor can be rendered safe within 10 seconds after notice of an oncoming quake, I think they've got a customer....

In PWRs, the control rods are held above a reactor's core by electric motors against both their own weight and a powerful spring. Any cutting of the electric current releases the rods. Another design uses electromagnets to hold the rods suspended, with any cut to electric current resulting in an immediate and automatic control rod insertion. A SCRAM mechanism is designed to release the control rods from those motors and allows their weight and the spring to drive them into the reactor core, in four seconds or less, thus rapidly halting the nuclear reaction by absorbing liberated neutrons. In BWRs, the control rods are inserted up from underneath the reactor vessel. In this case a hydraulic control unit with a pressurized storage tank provides the force to rapidly insert the control rods upon any interruption of the electric current, again within four seconds.

Once the rods are inserted, the reactor is deeply subcritical and so due to the exponential nature of nuclear physics the reaction dies away in fractions of a second. Perhaps of interest to you might be to know that Chernobyl's RBMK reactor was neither a PWR nor a BWR. It was a graphite-moderated water-cooled reactor with very serious design flaws that made its

SCRAM in 10 seconds is fine. But a SCRAMmed plant does not instantly become safe nor is it considered completely shut down. You still need heat removal for quite some time afterword ( which varies between designs) . That is where the seismic requirements come in. The heat removal systems must withstand the event and remain operational. Every single safety system and backup safety system is required to endure the event.

I was responding to parent's question of "Can it scram in 10 seconds?". You are of course completely correct that a plant that has been SCRAM'med isn't completely safe yet. I'm by no means a fan of current day water-based pressurized reactor systems, however, it seems so far they've held up really well (not a single civilian power reactor pressure vessel has failed or leaked over the past half century due to external forces - don't know about military ones, those are classified). This of course comes at the

FWIW, in Fukishima one of the main problems was with the cooling of spent reactor rods that were stored on site. Being SCRAMmed wouldn't help there. And they were a problem even on the reactors that had shut down normally.

Now Diablo Canyon wouldn't need to worry about corrosion due to using sea water to cool it in an emergency, but just how *would* they cool it in such an emergency?

In fact it's the opposite problem: spent fuel pools were ok, but the folks at Fukushima didn't know it and wasted a lot of time and man power trying to correct a non-existent problem. But your point is still good. Without cooling even the spent fuel pool will boil away after awhile (days? weeks?) and the bare fuel could melt down.

During the 11th March earthquake in Japan a couple of plants experienced problems with their SCRAM mechanisms. Although the rods can in theory fall due to gravity, it only works if the rods don't get stuck due to the violent lateral forces placed on them and the reactor shell. Fortunately enough rods did come down to control the reactors and allow them to be cooled, but it demonstrated the weakness in this design.

The other issue with earthquakes, which Fukushima and a couple of other Japanese plants experie

During the 11th March earthquake in Japan a couple of plants experienced problems with their SCRAM mechanisms.

Yes, that's possible, however the control rod budget is quite oversubscribed, so that even if some of them fail, there should be enough of them to stop the reactor. Should the gravitational system itself fail, it's always possible for the drive mechanism to push them inside after the fact. Lastly, should this fail, modern reactors (such as the AP1000) have on gravitational injection of borated coolant water, which kills the reaction, though takes a little longer and relies on the reactor vessel being intact

Yes, in 1999 (when I last toured the plant) the SCRAM time was 3.5 seconds with control rods fully placed in 0.5 seconds if the emergency circuit is tripped. This happens automatically in the event of a 6.0 or stronger quake. An emergency SCRAM requires 30 to 120 days to restart the reactor. Also like all reactors, it requires time to cool. Because DCNP is located on the ocean it does not require active cooling to safely cool the reactor core after a crash. flooding the core with sea water will probably

The basis for the inspectors complaint is, in large part, not that the plant is not capable of withstanding the quake, nor that the analsyis is faulty or incorrect, but rather that the licensing basis document has not been revised to require a higher peak acceleration design level. It is debateable whether such a would make any difference, since they are already required to analyze for the higher levels. Meanwhile, the concern is being handled through the appropriate processes.

I agree with your conclusion however I took away a different interpretation from TFA: the Hosgri fault was discovered during construction and not properly accounted for in the first place- making the comparison of the Shoreline fault to the Hosgri fault data questionable.

"Peck wrote that after officials learned of the Hosgri fault's potential shaking power, the NRC never changed the requirements for the structural strength of many systems and components in the plant."

I think we are saying the same thing. The 'requirements' are in the form of the licensing basis of the plant. They did the evaluation but did not revise the basis. When the actual fault data was finalized and useful is, however, unclear to me.

Meanwhile, there is a fleet wide re-evaluation of all sites underway to ensure any new seismic data for each regions/site is evaluated against the plants' existing capabilities.

A huge difference is that in this case, there is analysis to show the plant can withstand the postulated event. In the case of the tsunami, it was not so, as the plant was never designed to handle a tsunami. The key failing being placing a plant not designed to handle a tsunami in a potential tsunami path.

There's always analysis. The problem is, who's doing the analysis, what is their agenda, and who's tasked to act on said analysis.

I don't doubt that nuclear energy could be an amazing boon and used to a much greater extent, safely and profitably. If we could trust the energy industry and government regulators to do the right thing.

The basis for the inspectors complaint is, in large part, not that the plant is not capable of withstanding the quake, nor that the analsyis is faulty or incorrect, but rather that the licensing basis document has not been revised to require a higher peak acceleration design level. It is debateable whether such a would make any difference, since they are already required to analyze for the higher levels. Meanwhile, the concern is being handled through the appropriate processes.

The documentation is the beginning of the process to either revise processes or install modifications. This was the primary issue at Fukushima as the documentation to improve the sea walls was resisted and stopped. This meant the process to improve the seawalls there did not commence planning or other things required to improve the safety of the plant.

The author probably understands this because he has a deep understanding of reactors and the processes under which they operate. The belief system that surro

The fundamental flaw in your response is that the Fukushima units had no design features to deal with a tsunami from the start, so analysis was never part of the equation. If you postulate a tsunami that breaches the wall, then you must analyze the plant to ensure it can withstand, and this was never done. In the case of Diablo, they designed the plant with the ability to withstand an earthquake from the start. They postulated the earthquake, performed the analysis, then obtained new earthquake information

"PG&E research in 2011 determined that any of three nearby faults — the Shoreline, Los Osos and San Luis Bay — is capable of producing significantly more ground motion during an earthquake than was accounted for in the design of important plant equipment. In the case of San Luis Bay, it is as much as 75 percent more."

Per the usual, the simple fact that Natural Gas and Coal accidents/air pollution kills people every day is ignored compared to the remote risk of something happening to a nuclear powerplant.If the 3 nuclear reactors in Fukushima Daichi were instead 3 coal thermal boilers, it would have killed hundreds of people in the decades it operated.6.5 quake is peanuts for a nuclear reactor.Nuclear require an extreme accident to become a hazard to human life, while coal/NG kills every day.Even solar and wind kill more per TWh produced than nuclear, perhaps they can cleanup their act and have less work accidents before they can claim solar/wind is safer than nuclear.

Danger, to a large part, is about perception. Coal and NG kills only a few people at a time, which is highly preferable for politicians, whereas nuclear tends to come in very few and far between big events, so everybody is scared shitless, despite in absolute numbers the threat being negligible (think, by analogy, driving and flying, which has less fear surrounding it and which is safer in actual fact).
As for a comparison between nuclear, wind and solar, it gets kinda murky. For one, wind & solar don't

True, true, true. But nuclear has another very important advantage. Uranium is far more plentiful than natural gas even considering the 0,65% once through uranium burnup efficiency and a little over 1% with reprocessing. Still, a coal powerplant the size of a full size nuclear reactor takes in a hundred rail cars a day worth of coal, while assuming a mine with just 1% uranium content, a hundred rail cars worth of raw 1% concentration uranium is enough to power a reactor for a whole year.Nuclear power is 2 m

Uranium doesn't come as uranium, it comes as an oxide that's so hard to reduce that flouride is used. It's not that coal and gas is more plentiful it's that it's easier to start using the stuff.However in some places Uranium is mined as a side product to Copper and Gold mining since it's in the same ore.

Gas and oil extraction seem a little different. Oil is still taken from a reservoir layer though with new geometry while gas is now being taken from the source rock itself. That seems to explain why gas is holding at a low price in the US.

Wrong. There's a thousand years of uranium left. It's just more expensive uranium than today. Plus using an IFR reactor allows us to burn 100x better the uranium already mined (depleted uranium + spent nuclear fuel). Seawater has huge uranium reserves, it just costs like 5x more today to extract, but the cost to tap seawater uranium is continuously coming down.

the area around Chernobyl is uninhabitable. Before the accident, 120,000 people lived there. The Fukushima exclusion zone is currently a 30 km radius where all residents Were evacuated and is also a no-fly zone. The US Embassy subsequently advised Americans to keep a 80 km distance. Radiation induced cancers take decades to play out, and the claim that "no one died from Fukushima other than a few plant workers" is complete hogwash, as it's too soon to tell

You are drawing a conclusion based on overblown safety procedures.It's the same logic that stated Chernobyl would kill a million people.The LNT model isn't backed up by data.The problem is nuclear regulators have zero incentive to revisit their LNT assumptions.The radiation levels in the Chernobyl exclusion zone are similar to those measured in high elevation cities and sky resorts, yet people live there for centuries and they seem to live longer and have slightly lower cancer rates than those living at sea

As per the usual, the simple fact that Natural Gas and Coal accidents/air pollution kills people every day is ignored compared to the remote risk of something happening to a nuclear powerplant.

Not, it is not being ignored. I don't know about the US but in the EU there are very strict regulations governing gas and coal plants, and we are working towards getting rid of them or at least doing full capture of the output.

Incredibly are governments are capable of doing both things at once. I know, hard to imagine.

The numbers for harm done by modern western coal plants and especially the number of deaths attributed to solar and wind have been widely debunked anyway. That lame blog post that claimed sola

Nuclear require an extreme accident to become a hazard to human life, while coal/NG kills every day.

Uranium mining is hazardous to the miners and local/regional residents because of the radioactivity they are exposed to, uses large quantities of water to reduce airborne uranium dust, and uses a lot of fossil fuel to separate the uranium from the gangue and to transport it to the consuming power plants. Therefore, nuclear also kills every day. It just doesn't usually happen in the country using the nuclear fuel, so it's effectively Somebody Else's Problem, but a problem nonetheless. Nuclear power is NOT ca

It must be close to the end of design life for a lot of reactor components anyway. A combination of high stress and neutron bombardment is a lot like a combination of high temperature and high stress in the way the effected metal behaves so some parts don't last forever, and replacement can be expensive. I'm not predicting disaster just pointing out a well known problem - when microcracking is detected it can be a few years before it's going to grow into something serious but it's time to set things in mo

Which basically means pro-fossil. Don't let the siren song of wind and solar fool you. They both need 100% fossil fuel backup. Shutting down nuclear power plants simply hands energy generation back to coal and natural gas.

Solar and wind back each other up. http://www.engineering.com/Ele... [engineering.com] It's nukes that go out for weeks at a time needing typically fossil replacement energy. Shut them down permanently and wind and solar and hydro will rush in to replace them. Look at Vermont, heck look at California which recently closed another nuke.

Sorry, but no. Unreliable renewables go out every day (solar) or completely unpredictably. (solar and wind) They do not back each other up. Your link doesn't even claim that. Vermont and California are not making up for their nuclear shutdowns with renewables. They're using natural gas and coal.

Who should I believe, a respected laboratory, NREL, or some guy on the internet who can't be bothered to do math? Regarding Vermont, HydroQuebec is ready to cover Vermont Yankee. California should be obvious and it doesn't use coal. http://ecowatch.com/2014/03/17... [ecowatch.com]

33 years ago I was the cost analyst for the Diablo Canyon project. I've been inside the thing and earthquake safety was huge in the construction of the plant. It is VASTLY over-engineered for earthquake safety. The original spec was to survive an 8.0 earthquake on the San Andreas fault, which is 30 miles away. The Hosgri fault, which is just off-shore, was unknown at the time the plant was first sited and was only discovered later. The plant was re-engineered to withstand an 8.0 earthquake on the Hosgri fault, which hasn't moved in many thousands of years.

The real problem with Diablo Canyon, and the rest of the nuclear industry is managing the waste. There is no place to put nuclear waste in this country, so it's just stored on-site. That's crazy. You can't do that forever.

That being said, my expectation is that we'll continue to see tech advancements in solar and wind generation, and energy storage to the point where large central generation will be a thing of the past.

The issue does not seem to be the Hosgri fault, three miles away, but rather the "Shoreline fault, which snakes offshore about 650 yards from the reactors." Also, "PG&E research in 2011 determined that any of three nearby faults — the Shoreline, Los Osos and San Luis Bay — is capable of producing significantly more ground motion during an earthquake than was accounted for in the design of important plant equipment. In the case of San Luis Bay, it is as much as 75 percent more." With the of

Wouldn't it be keen if Diablo Canyon and the other operating nucleaar plants could rise up on giant clawed feet and saunter over to a state that actually wants a clean source of emissions-free energy.

It would also be cool if nuclear electricity was shaped a bit differently, perhaps a little series of dips in the sinusoid like tumblers in a lock... that way the grid could reconfigure itself to gather carbon free energy and pool it for use in states that are not driven by anti-nuclear hysterics.